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Muffarah Jahangeer was only 4 when her mother sent her off to school. That
might have been scary enough, but the school was in London, where she and her
parents had just moved from their native Pakistan.
She could not speak a word of English, so all she could do was cry.
After a few days, the principal called home. "All she does is cry all day
long," the principal complained. "Maybe it would help if one of you would come
to school and sit with her until she gets used to things."
Back in Pakistan, Muffarah's father had taught history at a government-run
university in Lahore. He had come to London so he could earn his Ph.D., then
return to Pakistan to teach.
But for the next month, her father's career plans took an unexpected detour. He
took turns with Muffarah's mother sitting with his daughter at her strange, new
school.
"Instead of going to his classes, he was going to mine," Muffarah said. "He was
the best dad."
By the time she was 6, Muffarah was reading encyclopedias, even the dictionary.
In English only. Muffarah turned 9 the year her family returned to Pakistan,
and immediately Muffarah found herself in the same predicament she had faced
five years before. She could speak fluent English, but had completely forgotten
Urdu, Pakistan's national language.
Her parents ended up sending her to the University of Cambridge, a convent
school that was a remnant of the former British Empire, and more important to
Muffarah, a place where English still reigned.
Now, some 40 years later, give or take, Muffarah has once again upped and moved
to a new city to go to a new school. Only this time she sent herself, with a
ticket of sorts from Carolina.
The ticket came in the form of the University's Tuition Waiver Program, which
is administered by the Training and Development Department of the Office of
Human Resources.
For the past year, Muffarah has served on the Career Development Committee of
the Employee Forum, lamenting the fact that not enough employees had chosen to
cash in on such a golden opportunity.
Serving with her on the committee was Fred Jordan, the supervisor of the
computer science department's electronics shop.
Jordan has known Muffarah for less than a year, but he discovered quickly her
passion for learning and her commitment to spurring interest in the Tuition
Waiver Program to which she had availed herself. During committee meetings, she
would talk about how important it was to produce a flyer designed to promote
the program by calling attention to people who have already benefited from it.
Jordan hopes the flyer can be distributed before the end of the fall
semester.
Of course, Jordan knew, Muffarah was a walking advertisement herself.
From Pakistan to RTP
The route that transported Muffarah from Pakistan to the Research Triangle Park
was a circuitous one, but each stop along the way could be traced to academic
pursuits that were never her own.
She graduated from high school at the age of 15, then earned a bachelor's
degree in biology and a master's degree in zoology from the University of
Punjab, the same university in Lahore that her father and grandfather attended
and where they would later teach. She, too, would teach there for a year.
It was here, too, where Muffarah met her husband, Saleem, who had already
completed two master's degrees by the time she met him. Shortly after they
married, Saleem sought out scholarships to complete his Ph.D. in physiology.
Two scholarship offers came -- one for Germany that would require him to go
alone, and a Fulbright Scholarship to the United States that would allow him to
take his wife.
He took the Fulbright and took off with his young wife for Washington D. C. and
George Washington University.
Muffarah found herself hanging out in her husband's research department so much
so that the professors urged her to apply to the Ph.D. program along with her
husband. "I can't," she would tell them. "We don't have any money."
The professors solved that by getting her a job at the university so she could
qualify for free tuition benefits. Her job was in the lab, and the work she was
given was research that was going to be her Ph.D. research.
"It was perfect, just perfect," Muffarah said. Perfect, that is, until she got
pregnant, and all her plans unraveled. The $375 stipend that Saleem received
with his Fulbright was barely enough to cover their room and board, and
Muffarah's meager pay could not cover the costs of daycare. Something had to
give, and that something ended up being Muffarah giving up the pursuit of her
Ph.D.
"I was uncomfortable with the idea of someone else teaching values to my child
that probably weren't mine," Muffarah said. Even if she could have afforded
daycare, she probably would have chosen to stay home with her daughter, anyway.
But as it was, the decision made itself.
After Kiren was born, Muffarah set about being a mother with the attitude that
it was the most important job she would ever have. Kiren stands for "a ray of
sunshine," and so she was, Muffarah said.
After her husband earned his Ph.D., his work took the family to Germany for a
year. When they returned to the States it was for Saleem to go to work at the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Maryland, where he had completed his
Ph.D. thesis.
It was at the NIH that Saleem met a fellow researcher with whom he clicked. The
two of them talked excitedly about the groundbreaking work they might do
together until the guy ended up leaving to go to work for the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park.
Years passed, then in 1990, Saleem got a call from the guy at NIEHS telling him
there was an opening for him if he wanted it.
Saleem took it without consulting Muffarah. Then he took it from Muffarah when
he tried breaking the news to her.
The conversation, she remembers, went something like this:
"North Carolina? You took a job in North Carolina? Do you know they have the
worst schools? They are ranked 48th in the nation!"
"Yes, yes," Saleem said, "but my boss said the state has Duke and UNC and they
are two really good schools."
"She's not there yet," Muffarah remembers screaming. "She's 8, not 18."
"We're going," Saleem insisted.
"No, you're going," Muffarah told him. I'm not taking Kiren down to that
terrible school system."
She may have won the argument, but she ultimately lost the war.
Muffarah figured he would change his mind if she refused to go, but he didn't.
"He's just as stubborn as I am, more stubborn."
And after a year of living apart, she caved in and joined him.
Learning curves
Once in North Carolina, Muffarah took a part-time job as an office manager in
Chapel Hill, even though she found out soon enough that there was nothing part
time about managing an office.
Then five years ago, as Kiren was about to enter high school, Muffarah got an
offer to work as the office manager for the School of Medicine's Information
Systems Office.
Managing an office was not what attracted her to the job. She knew she could do
that. What attracted her was that she would be surrounded by computers and
people who knew how to make them work.
"I wanted to know everything about computers, but it was a new field -- and I
had heard all these stereotypes about people who work on computers, how they
are geeks and maladjusted."
Her theory went like this: If you think you like something, get the inside
scoop before you jump in and find out you don't.
What she observed in her office encouraged her enough that she began taking
computer classes at nights and on weekends at Durham Technical Community
College.
After each test, she fixated on her scores, and thought nothing of badgering
instructors for her scores if they did not post them quickly enough to suit
her.
"I don't know what you're worrying about," one instructor told her, "your score
is always over 100 percent."
In fact, Muffarah scored so well she skewed the grading curve for the rest of
the class, and she did it by continuing to answer extra credit questions to
inflate an already perfect score.
Her success at Durham Tech assured her that her intellectual capacity had not
atrophied to the point of no return as she had feared. In fall of 1999,
emboldened by her success, she began running through a gauntlet of math courses
at Carolina, including three sequential courses of calculus.
She ended up in one of those introductory programming classes, along with 100
or so other students, and all but her appeared to be 18-year-old freshmen.
"I am one of those obnoxious students who sits in the front row," Muffarah
said. At first, she asked her questions to the students sitting next to her,
only to find out they were often no less confused than she was. So she began
raising her hand and asking Stephen Weiss, the chair of the computer science
department, who happened to be the instructor.
"It was nasty, horrible stuff, but the way he taught it was just lovely,"
Muffarah said of Weiss. "He could read the phone book and it would be
interesting. He was that kind of professor."
Best of all, the students accepted her without the lifted eyebrows she expected
from them. They did homework together, studied together, waited in line
together outside Weiss' office door to go over their questions with him. "I
began to tell myself that it didn't matter that they were 18 and I was not, I
was a student just like everybody else."
She ended up acing Weiss's class, along with all the other classes she took.
Emboldened by her success, she decided to resume work on a Ph.D., but a
different one from the one she had abandoned two decades before to become a
full-time mom.
Five years in the Information Systems Office taught her that she loved
computers as much as she thought she would. The math courses she mastered built
her confidence and convinced her of her ability to think logically and
sequentially. She knew she wanted to go after a Ph.D. with a connection to
computers.
At the same time, she had not lost her love for biology and physiology. She
knew that she wanted to be in a field that would allow her to marry these two
passions into one.
That field, which is still emerging, is bioinfomatics.
Bioinformatics, simply put, is the application of computer technology to the
management of biological information and is being used largely in the field of
human genome research.
For Muffarah, it was exactly the match she was looking for. But there were only
four universities in the country that offered a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, and
only one, the program offered by George Mason University in Washington, D.C.,
was involved in the kind of research that Muffarah was most interested in.
This spring, Muffarah applied to all four, and at the end of May, her future
arrived in the mailbox in the form of an acceptance letter from George Mason.
Muffarah was going to have to pack up and move once again, only this time, for
herself and by herself.
Never too late
Life has not turned out the way she planned it, not by a long shot. But it is
the unexpected twists and turns that have made it interesting and have led her
to opportunities she could not have imagined 18 years ago when she dropped her
pursuit of a doctorate to raise her daughter.
She has no regrets, does not, in fact, believe in them. "Regrets are a useless
waste of time. If you lived your life and didn't like it, you should have
changed it."
She has Kiren, after all. And now, she has a chance to pursue an area of study
that didn't exist 20 years ago.
Her father died in 1999, but the advice he gave her still rings true in her
head and heart. Muffarah is the oldest of his four daughters and he would tell
all of them, "I want all of you to have master's degrees. If you have a
master's degree, you will always have food on your table and people will
respect you."
And she and her sisters knew he was right, Muffarah said. "We all got master's,
each in different subjects, and we are all married with kids."
Now she is taking her father's advice one step further. At times, she feels as
excited and scared as she was as a little girl. And maybe that's part of the
reason she has chosen to do it.
Carolina has some of the best professors in the world, and employees are not
only are allowed to sit in their classes, they are able to take their courses
for credit, for free. And not that many golden opportunities in life come so
cheaply.
"It's a testament to the caliber of people who we have that they want to teach.
They want people to learn and they will encourage anyone who comes to their
class. I've taken so many classes, and I haven't hit a bad one yet."
And as Muffarah sees it, too few people are willing to go for it.
"There are barriers for a lot of employees. Some of them might think, `Why are
we going back to school, we already had our chance.' Some might think it's too
much work, or that people would laugh at them."
None of it is true, Muffarah said, except the part about work. And that's
nothing to be afraid of, either.
"Even if you are not taking a class for a degree, take it anyway," Muffarah
said. "It's better than watching TV. It's better than sitting around and doing
nothing. It opens your mind to new things, and it's so interesting to know
about the world around you. Challenge yourself."
The schools in North Carolina proved to be better for her daughter than
Muffarah had imagined them to be a decade ago. Kiren turned 18 in August
shortly before she started her freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta.
Muffarah finds it both strange and exhilarating that she will be going off to
college full-time this fall just like her daughter. In August, just as Muffarah
was finishing up her summer class, she found herself combing the classified
section of the Sunday The Washington Post looking for an apartment. She had to
find one that would allow pets because Kiren had already left for Atlanta. That
left her mother, so to speak, holding the cat.
The following Monday, when a landlord left a message on her answering machine
that an apartment was hers if she wanted it, she called him back immediately.
"Can you meet me at 11 tonight?" she asked him, explaining that she had a class
at 9:45 a.m. the next morning that she couldn't miss with her final only days
away. Muffurah calculated she could be in Washington in five hours, sign the
contract, and drive back. The landlord was reluctant to agree, and said he was
worried for her safety.
Before Muffarah left, she called her supervisor, Dennis Schmidt, who was
worried enough to talk her out of it. "Let's not be foolish," Schmidt told her.
Go to your morning class, then leave for Washington, Schmidt suggested. That
way, you would have a chance to actually look at the apartment and have a
better chance of coming back alive.
She followed his advice and got the apartment, plus an A in the class.
What does Saleem think about his wife's new adventure? "He said to me, `You've
done everything else in life, why not this? Of course you can do it.'"
Speaking of Saleem, he's in Japan, teaching at Kobe University's School of
Medicine. He was supposed to be have been gone for only a year, but that was
two years ago, Muffarah said. "I could smack him, but life goes on."
Sign up for tuition waiver by Jan. 14
About 400 University employees take advantage of the Tuition Waiver
Program each year. If you want to be one of them for the Spring 2002 semester,
your completed application (HR-83 form for those employees enrolling in classes
here) must be returned to the Training and Development Department no later than
Jan. 14, 2002. The forms can be obtained by calling 2-2550. More information
about the program and the entire application process is available at
http://www.ais.unc.edu/hr/
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